Where to Score Restaurant Leftovers For Cheap: New App PareUp Has the 411

by Gabriella Vigoreaux

on 05/01/14 at 03:05 PM

Have you ever wondered what happens to all the excess foods that restaurants produce? Ever lingered at your favorite bakery five minutes before closing to see if they would give you leftover pastries? I have. (Shout out to the 16 Handles in Brooklyn that gave me free pints of fro-yo at 10:00 pm once.) Thanks to PareUp, a new app with aims to reduce food waste, consumers can now easily identify restaurants and food retailers with excess food to spare.

Did you know that our country wastes 30 to 40 percent of its food? Every day New York City throws away 6.5 million pounds of it.

"We also lose all the natural resources that went into producing the food -- $700 billion worth, according to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations," reports HuffPo.

PareUp is aiming to fix that by both relieving restaurants of their food waste and offering them to consumers at a disccounted rate.

How does it work? Basically the retailer will alert PareUp users when they have extra food at the end of the day and will offer it to them for cheap prices. The most obvious particpants will include bakeries and coffeeshops who can now sell day-old pastries rather than throw them away. Cheap baked goods to help the environment? I'm there. I always had a thing for day old doughnuts...